Never Turn Your Back

“Never turn your back on reality, it surrounds you.”

– Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Yeah, I had to look him up too. He was a Polish aphorist and poet. I had to look up what an aphorist was as well. Someone who excels at aphorisms, apparently. I didn’t even know that was a thing. If I’d known at a younger age that that was a thing my whole life might have turned out differently. Not that I’ve ever had any aptitude for aphorisms, but I could have at least applied myself and who knows where I might have ended up. Oh well. Anyway, at the age of thirty four Stanislaw escaped from a German concentration camp by killing his guard with a shovel after being taken to dig his own grave. Exactly. You can take this preface to what follows however you like. To be honest, even I’m not sure what I was thinking; some kind of connection in my brain that I’m unable to articulate. Perhaps this is a perfect example of where an excellence in aphorisms may have helped us both out. Perhaps not.

The sound of a ball bouncing on the patio and the reverberations of said ball smacking against the outside of the building and rattling the fire escape doors, signals the arrival of Liam and Sam. I ignore them at first, wanting to at least get a bit of work done, but I don’t want to miss out entirely on a reprieve from having to be here for seven hours with only an hour and a half’s worth of building occupancy to supervise, so I head outside to join them.

Sam’s latest game is standing on the patio fielding kicks from the lawn toward him. At first he tells me to go and join Liam on the grass but then he changes his mind and sends his dad onto the patio and joins me on the lawn instead.

“Divide and conquer,” I tell Liam.

“He knows we’ll be giving it all that,” Liam replies, miming a talking mouth with his hand. But it’s not long before Sam decides he would rather be on his own, the star of the receiving end, and swaps places with his dad. Liam and I take turns dutifully kicking the ball up the gradient to him. It’s harder than it looks to get it through or over the railings. Our greatest achievement is when the ball skims off the top of the railings but still makes it onto the concrete.

“Look at that!” Liam says. “It only happens now and then but it’s very satisfying isn’t it?”

“Liam!” Sam shouts at him, impatiently. “Liam! Liam!”

“Jesus,” Liam mutters, “let us have one moment to appreciate it won’t you?”

“Liam! Liam!”

“Alright Geez,” he says wearily.

Liam and I carry on taking turns kicking the ball up to Sam whilst carrying on our conversation. Liam’s in a dispute with his employers, a company who run a number of care homes for children with autism in the city. It’s complicated, but as far as I can work out it involves a grievance he made formally about the way some of his colleagues treat the kids. That grievance lead to him being bullied by his managers and his getting signed off work with stress. Then his union got involved. For the last three weeks, other than looking after Sam, this dispute is all he’s been dealing with. The latest news is that he requested a copy of the notes his managers made during the initial meeting about his grievance and now those managers are telling him they’re having to refer his request to the company’s legal team. He says the union rep assigned to his case is worthless, they’ve done nothing he couldn’t have done himself. I tell him that back when I was working in social research I found myself in a similar situation, twice, with two different employers.

“You kind of assume that because you’ve done the right thing someone will have your back,” I reflect, “but then you realise you’re on your own.”

“No one’s got your back.”

“After the second time I thought, ‘you know what? I’m done with this’. Maybe it’s time to do something else?”

“Yeah, but like what?” Liam asks. “I’m not qualified to do anything else and I’m too old to start from scratch.”

“You need to earn a living.”

“I need to earn a living,” he echoes. “We’ve got him to take care of.”

Sam is simultaneously lost in his own thoughts and automatically fetching and kicking the ball back down to us.

“But this job’s alright isn’t it?” Liam asks me. “Getting paid to sit and write stories?”

“I do that in my own time. I can’t do that when I’m here. There are too many distractions.”

“Sorry about that.”

Up on the patio, Sam is yelling “Blah, blah, blah!” He’s been doing it for a while now, we’ve just been doing our best to ignore him. Liam’s about to kick the ball up to him and stops.

“Geez, if you’re going to do that I’m not playing,” he tells Sam.

Sam looks amused. Liam isn’t.

“Seriously Geez, if you’re going to carry on doing that, I’m done.”

Sam looks concerned.

“Are you going to stop?” Liam asks him.

“Yeah,” Sam says, earnestly.

“Alright,” Liam replies and kicks the ball back to him. “I wish he could turn that energy into something useful, do you know what I mean?” he says to me. “I never taught him that, he came up with that idea all by himself. It was annoying, wasn’t it?”

“It was. He wants our attention.”

“Yeah,” says Liam, “tough. I’m not doing anything fun with him today. He was beating up his mum in a shop yesterday. So we’re not going out anywhere, we’ve just come here.”

“I’m his punishment.”

“Yeah, well, sort of, sorry. He likes coming here, he likes seeing you, he’d just rather we were out on the bike.”

For a while Sam is quiet and Liam and I carry on talking while kicking the ball to him, but after a few minutes he starts growling loudly. He’s figured out that the the stranger or more annoying the sound he makes, the harder it is for us to ignore him. Liam looks both beaten and amused. “I don’t know how I do it,” he says.

“I don’t know how you do it.”

“I don’t have any choice,” he replies. “Look, there’s your mate,” he tells me, looking over my shoulder. I turn around to see Rami arriving for his weekly chat.

“I’ll catch up with you later,” I tell Liam.

“Puh-Paul!” shouts Sam. “Wh-where are you g-going?”

“I’ll be back in a while,” I call out to him.

The surgical facemask Rami now sports has become the norm. He looks as sane as any of us. “I miss my cafes,” he tells me, despondently. Sitting in cafes poring over his notes for spiritual enlightenment and never-to-be-made screenplays was an anchor of his old routine. “I had a message from my friend Gloria,” he tells me. “I haven’t seen her in fifteen years. She’s coming over to the UK and asked me if I wanted to meet her for a coffee. I had to tell her no. I said I would meet her to go for a walk but I haven’t sat down in a cafe for months and I’m not about to start now.”

The last time Rami and I talked our conversation ended on a disparaging disagreement about the directorial merits of Christopher Nolan and Ridley Scott. I’d rather Scott, Rami was in favour of Nolan. Ultimately, I couldn’t care less either way, but I was saddened that we couldn’t find a middle ground. Today that conversation has been all forgotten; Rami is more focussed on the continued Facebook posts of Emily. He doesn’t so much have a problem with her beliefs as the way she judges those who don’t share them.

“But isn’t that a problem with having beliefs?” I ask him.

“Not at all, ” he tells me. “I don’t judge people who don’t believe what I do. Everyone is welcome to believe whatever they want. I just take exception to those who pass judgement on others for theirs.”

“But what’s the difference? You’re still judging others. Isn’t that pretty much the same thing?”

“Not at all,” he says, but doesn’t elucidate, leaving me to question my own line of reasoning. He reminds me of an aggrieved email he once received from a militant vegan who attended one of his workshops. “I saw him again the other day,” he says. “I ignored him. In fact, just thinking about him makes me want a steak. I’m going to get one from Tesco on the way home. Happy Days. Hopefully soon we’ll get rid of all this,” he says sweeping his arm over one of the social distancing notices the council have stencilled on our patio. As he does so precious stones and crystals skitter across the paving stones.

“Oh no, your bangle’s broken. That’s a bad omen,” I joke.

Rami’s bracelet was uniquely crafted by a Californian artisan he’s on first name terms with. I know this because he had her make one for me too. He had to take a photo of me first to give to her so that she could tune her creation to my own personal vibrations. It was a nice thought but I’ve never worn it.

“Don’t say that,” he tells me, looking concerned. “That’s a good omen…just as I was talking about the sign. I’m going to put the pieces in a – what do you call those little plastic bags?”

“Baggies?”

“Right. I’ll put the pieces in one of those and send them back to California.”

“Couldn’t you just put it back together yourself? Do the pieces have to go in a special order?”

Rami looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Some of these Lapis lazuli pieces are incredibly rare,” he says. I’m fairly sure they’re not, it’s a pretty common gemstone, but I keep this to myself. “That was a good omen,” he tells me again, convincing himself. “What’s the date today?” he asks.

“The ninth. The ninth of the ninth.” I only know this because I had the same conversation in a hardware store earlier. “I think today’s my wedding anniversary,” I told the man behind the counter. He also looked at me like I was an idiot. I was going to explain that I’ve been divorced for ten years but thought better of it.

“Mars is about to go into retrograde,” Rami informs me. “That’s even worse than Mercury in retrograde.”

I shake my head. “I don’t know what that means,” I tell him. “I don’t know what you mean by retrograde.” And it occurs to me that I’m mirroring another conversation I had with him recently when he told me that he didn’t know what I meant by the term ‘science’. As often happens in our conversations he declines to explain, waving the question away because more important matters are pressing.

“There’s a steak with my name on it waiting for me in the supermarket,” he says. “I’m going to go and claim it before someone else does.”

Soon after Rami leaves, Daniela appears. It’s the first Italian class she’s taught since March but she’s had no time off. After completing her Masters degree last year she got a job as an advocate for people with mental health problems and has been working all through lockdown. She arrives tonight wearing a surgical mask and continues to wear it throughout her language lesson.

“I work with vulnerable people,” she says, referring to her other client group, “I don’t want to put them at risk.”

Sam and Liam are still kicking the ball between them when Jen arrives with bags of shopping she’s picked up in town. Liam and Jen communicate constantly by phone, monitoring how one or the other is coping with Sam, checking in, stepping in when needed. They’re both hoping that her appearance this evening will shift Sam’s mindset into wanting to go home for his tea. The strategy works – it doesn’t always, but today it does – and Sam, distracted by his mum and her bags of shopping, loses interest in playing football. Liam and Jen begin steering him out of the garden. Before they go Sam runs up to me to say goodbye.

“B-bye Paul!” he says.

“Bye Sam, ” I tell him, “good to see you.”

We bump elbows and as he passes behind me he jabs his elbow into my kidneys.

I groan, winded. Liam and Jen laugh.

“Never turn your back on him, Paul,” says Jen.

“Fatal mistake,” adds Liam.

“That’s how he gets you.”